When their new $70,000 princess-themed playroom is finished in March, Stella, 4 years old, and Presley, 2½, will have a faux gem-encrusted performance stage, a treehouse loft, and a mini-French cafe. A $20,000 custom carpet with colorful pathways will lead the girls to the various play areas.

“It’s going to be a pink explosion, with hearts and bows and crowns and tassels,” says their mother, Lindsay Dickhout, chief executive of a company that makes tanning products. The playroom will occupy about 1,500 square feet on the ground floor of the family’s 7,000-square foot home in Newport Beach, Calif.

I’d like to note that my apartment is about 400 square feet. I’d also like to note that if I could afford it, I’d love a bigger place (my id: MORE SPACE! MORE SPACE! MORE SPACE!) but 1500 sq feet seems extravagant (not that I’d turn that down, mind you. . .) and 7000, well, that might as well be 70,000. Jeez.

Onward:

Dahlia Mahmood, whose company Dahlia Designs has offices in Los Angeles and Ashburn, Va., created a $200,000 princess-fairy themed room for a 2-year-old girl in Virginia five years ago. She built a castle-shaped bed with turrets in which all the girl’s princess dolls could be stored. The room has its own entrance with a tiny door, too small for adults but just right for the little girl. Hand-painted bathroom walls were accented with Swarovski crystals.

When the girl turned 4, Ms. Mahmood returned to the project and redesigned the room, removing portions of the castle, expanding the bed to full size and installing two large, molded, fiberglass trees outfitted with twinkle lights, she said.

Now, why do I think this is more about the parents than the children? Perhaps this:

While the family was out of their Millstone Township, N.J., home, Ms. Blum Schuchart went in and installed the “royal prince nursery.” The room, which Ms. Urs estimated cost between $15,000 and $18,000, included a crib with blue satin ribbons, a Rococo-style dresser painted in silvery-gold and elaborate tufted blue curtains. The family saw the room for the first time when they came home from the hospital with their new baby, Luke.

“The boy’s room is very regal. I’ll be heartbroken when Luke wants it to be a big-boy Dallas Cowboys room,” despite her love for the team, Ms. Urs said.

And status, of course. It’s all about status:

Some companies say that when it comes to princess décor, Marie Antoinette-level pricing works best.

PoshTots, a Chesapeake, Va.-based online retailer of children’s furniture, sells expensive items including $35,000 princess carriage beds. A few years ago, the company introduced a $3,900 princess bed in the hope it would find more customers than the company’s nearly $10,000 option. But sales of the cheaper product were a dud. “If our customer wants to go princess, they’ll go for the $10,000 bed,” said Andrea Edmunds, PoshTots’ director of marketing.

Some parents do have a glimmer that indulging every offhand desire of the tot set just might have adverse long-term consequences, but one mother bravely waves aside such concerns:

“They have their whole lives to think practically and be efficient in the real world. This is about being creative,” said Ms. Dickhout. “I’m not at all worried about them becoming princesses.”

Does it infringe upon the rights of parents to raise their children to insist that they educate their children up to a certain point and to certain standards?

Yes. So?

We in the US (and most other places on the planet) sensibly grant parents the right to raise their children as they see fit, but this particular right is conditional, not absolute. If they neglect or abuse or deny medical treatment to their children they will lose those rights, and once the children reach certain ages (these vary depending upon the circumstances), the parents lose those rights, regardless.

(“Right” is an awkward term to use in this case, largely because rights are assumed—not by me!—to be absolute and inalienable, such that to speak of “conditional rights” seems nonsensical. “Privilege”, however, seems too cramped a term; “authority” works pretty well. . . so, ah, yeah, I’ll use authority here on out.)

In any case, what I now call “authority” and what others might insist is a “right” has nonetheless come to be seen as something which, unfortunately unique among our understanding of rights, is paired tightly to “responsibility”. The default mode is parental authority/right/responsibility for children, such than an abuse of authority/failure to meet responsibility leads to loss of said authority/right.

Christ, I’m really talking around the issue, aren’t I? Nothing like spending two days in a writing seminar to unmake one’s ability to write.

Anyway. That we as a polity might infringe upon parental authority is neither new nor necessarily unjust. We might have good reasons to be suspicious of state mandates regarding children—see the history of removing Native American children from their homes, as unjust a policy as there was—but it is also the case that, absent state action, children suffer at the hands of their parents.

I can’t really object to religious or cultural communities wanting to instill their values into minor members of their communities (even though I do), because as deep a civic republican as I am, I am also a narrow civic republican who thinks pluralism is the bee’s knees (even if I am occasionally exasperated by those bee’s knees).

I”m losing the thread again, aren’t I? Shit.

Okay, I’ll just skip to the conclusion since I”m obviously skipping all over the place anyway. Requiring parents to educate their children is not an unjust limitation of their freedom to raise their children as they see fit, because parents ought not have the freedom to deny freedom to their children.

And the parts I skip over? All of the tough balancing between parents’ rational desires to pass their values along to their children and what to do when those values hinder their kids’ abilities to make, when they come of age, their own decisions. Amish and Satmar and FLDS children are not just Amish and Satmar and FLDS members, but individuals who, like every other individual, deserve to be recognized in and covered by the law, and not merely covered by their parents.

Or maybe, How marvelous that parents retain the right to so completely control their children that those children are utterly unequipped to find their own way in the world, and are thus effectively prevented from ever leaving the community?

It’s even better when they get state support for such community-building. . . .

That could be old, I guess, but it’s tough for me to think of her (or my dad, 73 in December) as old. They golf and take vacations and go swimming and take walks and work out and play cards and watch movies and, I dunno, do all the stuff they’ve done for the past thirty or forty years.

Maybe more slowly, but, hell, a couple of years ago they went to Costa Rica and whipped down a zip line.

Anyway, my pop got my mom a Nook for her birthday. I told her about The Unexpected Neighbor.

Which was unexpected.

I didn’t think I’d tell ’em because I thought, well, they’re not going to read this thing on their computers. Plus, there’s the link to my profile, which includes a link to this blog.

My family doesn’t know about this blog.

Now, it’s not a problem if my mom follows the link and finds this blog. When I started the blog it was VERY IMPORTANT to me that I retain my pseudonymity, but over the years I’ve loosened up a lot. (And, obviously, in posting the link to The Unexpected Neighbor I made it very easy for anyone to find out who I am.) Since I had decided that I wouldn’t say anything behind my big red cube that I wouldn’t in front of my name, traversing the distance between my given name and my absurd one isn’t that great.

Still, I like that distance.

Anyone runs a search on me, this wouldn’t be the first thing to pop up. (Although I don’t know that I’d be the first thing to pop up if I ran a search on my name: it’s not uncommon. Anyway, I don’t know, because it’s been, mmm, five years? ten? since I ran a search on my name. Some shit I don’t need to worry about.) And, to extend this, I like having that space between my teaching self and my musing/ranting self. Finally, however much I’ve given myself over to the cyber-machine, I still don’t care to make it easy for the Googleplex to connect my absurd self to the rest of my life.

So, what if my mom or pop or anyone else in my family reads my blog? Eh, I don’t know. They’d be bored by the politics and likely put off by the swearing and they might wonder about my wonderings.

I don’t know that I want them wondering about my wonderings but, really, isn’t it long past time for me to stop policing what others may think of me?

I mean, let’s be real: I’m always going to try to police what people think of me, but I’m way past knowing that others will think what they think, regardless.

That’s how it’s always been, hasn’t it? You do what you do and everyone else will do what they do and sometimes it matters more than anything and sometimes it doesn’t matter at all.

I like my parents, I do. And I respect them. I also recognize that on many levels we have little more in common than our genes.

Now, we do have enough in common—chattiness, a penchant for peanuts and beer, a basic degree of courtesy—that we can get along. From a distance of a thousand miles. Or for weekend visits in which I fly to them and then spend half of my time with other people.

But they’re coming here. Because I invited them.

Did I really think they’d come? After their last visit, they said, That’s our last visit. Of course, they drove, and stayed at a hotel in Queens that was near exactly nothing, and I’d only been in NY a short while and didn’t really know my way around, so it made sense that the trip was more hassle than it was worth. But once I moved into own new place—i.e., a place they could stay—it seemed to me that I ought at least ask them to stay.

See, that basic courtesy shit.

And they reciprocated. I don’t know that they really want to hang out in New York City. They see museums as a chore, aren’t into adventures in food, are not aficionados of the avant garde, and don’t really cotton to the idea of ‘just hanging out’ or ‘soaking it in’. No, they’re here to see me.

Again, that basic courtesy shit.

I don’t know what to do with them, and they most definitely are ‘doers’ (see: don’t just hang out). Thursday is set—they’re taking me to the Rockettes and then seeing another show while I teach—but Friday Saturday Sunday? I have no idea.

I sent them a long list of possibilities, figuring it would be better if they’d pick what they’d like to do, and then I’d go with them. Tenement Museum (they do like historical stuff), boat tours, tunnel tours—they haven’t said a word. I am afraid, very afraid, that they’ll want me to figure it all out.

If my folks were up for anything, this wouldn’t be problem. They are not up for anything.

So I’m thinking that we could hit the Craft Fair at St John the Divine’s on Friday, then they could, I don’t know, do something while I teach that night. Saturday, if it’s nice, we can walk through Prospect Park and maybe hit the Slope. Maybe we can dial up a movie to watch Saturday night.

Sunday? Christ. There’s a Packer bar in the West Village—maybe they’ll go for that. I don’t know what time their flight leaves on Monday; I hope it’s not too late.

That sounds terrible, doesn’t it? I’m girding myself for a visit from two people who love me, a visit I should be anticipating with joy rather than dread.

And so I am trying not to dread. Breathe in, breathe out. Empty my mind, empty my self. No fear, no dread, just being.

I don’t have anything against it, and it’s not that I don’t believe that it exists (whatever that means), but love and I don’t have much to do with each other.

I’m thinking about this because I referred to love in the comments to my last post, asking if someone were told that her belief was hated but that she was loved, would she, in fact, feel loved?

It was not so much the definition of love I was after so much as the question of being, but, nonetheless, it felt a bit. . . odd to use the term.

People have told me they loved me. My parents. My friend M. (who knows how it discomfits me). And I would guess that at least some of my friends would say, if not to me then at least about me, that they love me.

I don’t disbelieve them: if they say they love me, then okay. But I don’t feel it.

And I don’t feel badly about it. A little bad, insofar as I don’t say it back—this is one lie I can’t quite manage—but I don’t feel this great gaping and gasping pain of the absence of it in my life. Perhaps I can say that I feel the absence, but it is simply absence, something I register, and nothing more.

Have I ever felt love? I don’t know. I remember as a child telling my parents I loved them, and I think I would have said that I loved people (I certainly loved my pets) and meant it, but I also remember feeling that there was something obligatory in the saying: It was always tied, always. . . crimped or stapled into some line of duty.

I don’t remember it ever having been—although it must have been, once, it must have been—free.

And because it wasn’t free, because there was always that stitch in the side of any profession of love, it felt like a lie, a compulsion in order to reassure those around me that. . . oh, christ, I don’t know what. That I belonged? I can’t remember this, either, can’t remember why I felt guilty for saying it, only that I did, that I questioned whether I meant it.

This isn’t about conditional versus unconditional love: conditional doesn’t equal coerced. But I did feel compelled, for whatever reason, felt that there were certain things I must feel about certain people, and that I had to rank these people in a particular order—family before friends, parents before all others—and that to break ranks was a kind of betrayal.

And I betrayed.

Again, I don’t know where these feelings came from. Parents are the usual suspects, but they did (do) love us, and they did (do) try to be good parents. Perhaps it was a matter of their uncertainties and my sensitivities colliding in a way no one intended, but leaving us all damaged, nonetheless.

Damaged, hm. No, I’m not pained, but I do recognize that this absence is, indeed, an absence. And I wonder what its presence is like, and whether I, so long used to living without it, could even ever know what love is.

I don’t know what I’m missing, which makes me wonder what I’m missing.